Cheapflights Media Ltd. is a private international online media (dot-com) company based in London and Boston that operates travel websites. Cheapflights Media's sites do not sell flights but publish deals online from hundreds of airlines, low cost airlines and travel operators that fly out of the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Canada. Each country has a dedicated website to help consumers, particularly with flexible schedules to find flight deals and relevant travel information.
Founded by travel journalist John Hatt, Cheapflights pioneered the travel Search Engine (TSE) concept in 1996.[1] Following a management buy-in in early 2000 by entrepreneurs David Soskin and Hugo Burge,[2] Cheapflights introduced the pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising remuneration model, the first vertical search travel price comparison site to do so.The then pioneering concept continues to provide airlines and other travel operators with free listings for their flights deals which are then published online. Advertisers such as BA and Expedia then only pay for the high quality leads that click through to their sites or telephone call centres. In 2009, Cheapflights Media had some 88 million visits to its sites and helped its advertisers to achieve an estimated UK$2.6 billion sales.
Apart from daily publishing over a million flights deals for comparison by consumers each day, Cheapflights also includes additional travel information for consumers and news on low cost and major airlines on its websites through a news blog on each side of the Atlantic. It also has free weekly newsletters for air-travellers in the US and UK, which now have more than 3 million opt-in subscribers.
In 2010, Cheapflights Media beta-launched its next generation flights meta-search product zugu in the US, UK and in Germany to complement its original flight deals product. zugu enables users with set travel requirements to search for flights by travel date/time of day and destination and other useful functionality.